


Nerd alert squared

by Beleriandings



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Minor blupjeans, a silly headcanon of mine, contractually obligatory vore joke re: Upsie, lich Barry has fun being an eldritch horrorterror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 09:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12407418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: A (somewhat) fateful meeting of nerds, some time soon after the crew of the Starblaster had their memories erased.





	Nerd alert squared

**Author's Note:**

> So Lucas is canonically in his late 20s in canon era, so that means at this point he would be a late teenager. And the idea of him meeting lich!Barry was too good to resist.

“What’re you doing in my mom’s lab?”

Barry froze, his spectral form suspended a little way off the ground, at the sight of the kid in front of him. _About seventeen, all gangle limbs with a little smattering of acne on his face, and thick glasses that reflected the dim red, blinking light from the device he held up in one hand in the half-darkness. He was wearing a too-large labcoat and holding a wand, in his free hand.  
_

_He didn’t look scared at all.  
_

Barry shook himself. Metaphorically, of course, as he didn’t technically have a body right now. _It was fine; the kid couldn’t see him, unless he chose to reveal himself.  
_

Even as he had the thought, the boy raised his wand and cast True Seeing on himself. _  
_

Eyes widened behind thick glasses, in mingled horror and fascination _.  
_

_Well, fuck_ , thought Barry. _  
_

Barry floated in the air staring back at the oddly unafraid-looking teen _. If this kid talked…_ Lucretia had connections to Miller Labs. That was why Barry had risked so much to come here, after all. _And even if this was just some junior lab assistant that no one was likely to listen to…  
_

Barry did the only thing he could think of in the moment. _  
_

_“G̶͟Ơ̧ ̸B̵͡ACK̨͜ ͠TO͝ ͏̴THE̷̡ ͟L͡͠I̵G̢͞H̛T͘,҉͝ ͢͟͢H̨UM̵̵̕A̷N̵ ̡CḨ̕Į͢L̶̢D”_ he hissed. This part at least, he sort of enjoyed; one of the advantages of his lich form was that doing spooky voices didn’t fuck up the throat like it always had when he was just a regular flesh boy. _“"T̴̴҉H͞E̕ ͝Ḑ̵͡A̵͝RK̷͞ ͘Į̢͞S̷̵ ̨H̨̧U̴͠N̨͠G͠҉R̕̕͡Y.͘҉ ͏͘͏SĮL͟͡E̶̡N͜CE̶͡ ͠͝WI̡L̴̨͝L̶ ͜S͝ET̛͢ ̷̶Y̢͡O̷U҉͡ ̷̶͢F̵RE̷E̷͟.͏̕“_ Barry winced internally. Not really one of his better Ominous But Vague Statements Of Intimidation, but it would have to do for now. And it wasn’t too bad, at least considering he was doing this of the cuff. One had to take some sense of pride in these things, after all. _  
_

Not that it had apparently had the intended effect; namely, the effect of shutting the kid up. 

“Ah… okay, okay.” He put his wand back in his labcoat pocket, raising a placating hand. “Cool. Cool cool cool. Maybe we uh… got off on the wrong foot. You’re a lich, right? That’s pretty neat! I’ve never met one before. You got it wrong though… I’m not a child.” He drew himself up a little taller. “I’m a _scientist_.”

If Barry’s face hadn’t been a spectral skull he would have raised an eyebrow.

The lanky teen rubbed the back of his neck, as the silence grew awkwardly long. “Ah… so hi! My name’s Lucas. Um. Guess I should have started with that, maybe.” He extended a nail-bitten hand. “Lucas Miller.” _  
_

_Well, fuck_ , Barry thought once more. _Miller? A relative of the family?_ Maybe this wouldn’t be so easy after all.

This had not been the way he had expected this to play out. Of all the things that could go wrong with the plan to sneak into Miller Labs, he hadn’t expected that he might have to kill a kid - and quite possibly the heir to the Miller science empire - to cover his tracks. Well, he thought regretfully, maybe there was nothing for it.

But still, Barry did nothing. Lucas drew back his hand. He looked a little warier now. _Maybe the kid did have some sense after all_. “Um. Sorry. I guess you’re not corporeal so maybe it’s… rude?” he rubbed the back of his neck again. “Are you part of an experiment mom didn’t tell me about? Because she’s not here at the moment, but…” he looked around the lab. “Sorry if it’s…uh…rude to ask. But what are you doing out here?”

Barry made his eyes flare with cold fire; he still clung to the hope that maybe intimidating the kid would get him to run away, and better still, to keep his mouth shut. “What are _you_ doing here?” he countered, for good measure; he was banking on the fact that - as he suspected - he himself wasn’t the only one sneaking around where he wasn’t supposed to be tonight. Belatedly, he realised he had reverted to his more usual voice, though it still sounded a Pleasing Everyday Degree of Eldritch, as it always did these days.

Sure enough, Lucas twitched, his hands twisting nervously behind him. “I’m… uh… look I know I’m not allowed in this wing at night, or, ah… ever I guess, but listen, mom goes away sometimes, and I figured…” he held a stack of books and a sheaf of paper in his arms; handwritten notes it looked like, with hastily pencilled diagrams. There was a stack of them, all out of order; Lucas looked a little harried as he tried to hastily shuffle them back into place. Nevertheless, Barry was able to get the general idea. 

If he had had a living body, he would have drawn in a gasp. 

There was a diagram of the planar system, scribbled down names of the different planes, the gemstones that resonated with each. All of this was familiar to him, a tug in his chest as it brought back bittersweet memories, with force. 

But there was something else, too; something even more familiar, something that should not exist on a pad of notepaper in this lab he had broken into, that by rights shouldn’t exist anywhere in the world except in his own mind, and a few others. 

It was a diagram of the Starblaster. 

He felt his lich form ripple with icy, smokeless fire in the still air, the equivalent - he had learned some time ago - of a shiver running up his living body.

 _Break into Miller labs_ , h _e had thought. He had his sources; scientists took time off,_ and even ones who worked on top-secret projects were wont to blab about their work sometimes through sheer nerdy enthusiasm. Especially when plied with drinks in the sort of Neverwinter dive bars that didn’t bat an eyelid at a lich as long as he paid in gold pieces. Especially when he lent an ear to endless complaints about layoffs in favour of robot workers; those were inexplicably common too, and rather obnoxious in Barry’s opinion.

Still, he kept that to himself usually. For it had been thus that Barry had heard two interesting tidbits of information about Miller Labs. The first, that they had been working on necrorobotics; from what he understood, the technology sounded far too similar to the crystal that they had taken from that doomed world to be merely coincidence.

(If he could steal the technology, would - theoretically - inhabiting a robot body make him more or less difficult for Lucretia to track? To what extent would his memory remain? Barry had turned these questions endlessly over and over in his mind, when he wasn’t thinking about Lup, the relics, the others, everything else that filled the long, sleepless nights as a disembodied spirit with troubles.) 

The second piece of information had been all the more tantalising; it was said that the Millers were building a hangar for a great sky ship, for a client that not even the lab’s few remaining non-robotic staff knew the real name of, but who was known only as _Madame Director._ He had tried not to let his lich form flare out in agitation when he had heard that. Finding out where Lucretia had spirited the Starblaster away to would be the greatest benefit to him, even though any mission there would be truly mind-meltingly risky. He was almost certain to get caught, and he didn’t even know now that she wouldn’t trap him with one of her wards; it _hurt_ , not trusting her. It hurt so much, every time. Still, he couldn’t let his guard down now. 

But if he could get to the Starblaster again, he could get to his equipment, his arcane tomes and the powerful material components for spells he had prepared, before he had lost everything. 

(Maybe he could even get to Fisher, and _somehow_ put all this right…)

He should have known he’d be getting more than he bargained for.

Something must have showed, for Lucas tilted his head. “Ah… are you okay?”

“Where did you get that?” 

Lucas winced again, harder this time, and clutched the stack of papers closer to his chest, dropping a few to the ground in the process. “Um… I mean, technically, I guess… they’re….” he broke off. “Listen, uh, your…. undeadness… what is your name, by the way?”

“Ba - ” he changed his mind. “Um. Hallwinter. Sildar Hallwinter.” The old alias he and Lup and Taako had come up with as a joke in the Starblaster’s kitchen; it was the first thing that had popped into his mind, and he supposed it would have to do for now. “…I guess you could say I’m a…” he freewheeled a little. “A friend of the family.”

That seemed to have the opposite effect to the reassurance he had intended. “Right. Um… Mister Hallwinter, you, um, won’t tell my mom, will you? That I was in here, you mean?”

Barry stared at this sudden derailment. “Why would I do that? I’ve never met your mom.”

“Wait, but I thought you said you were a friend of the family?

“Ah…. did I say friend? I mean… fan! I’m a fan of the family! The Millers, amiright? Uh… elevators. I’m… ah… an elevator lich! _Big_ fan! I’ve followed your family’s work for generations.”

“Oh, nice! Say, I’ve been thinking of trying to design a sentient elevator.”

“…Wait. What.”

“Yeah, it would just…” Lucas made a clamping motion with his hands. “Eat people up, and take them where they want to go.” He grinned. “My scale model has a realistically rendered mouth, to add to the realistic experience. Neat, right?”

“That’s nasty, kid.”

“I can’t believe I just got kinkshamed by a goddamn lich.”

“…Fair.” 

“But yeah, fact remains” said Lucas, almost regretfully. “I don’t know how you got in here, and I guess you don’t _technically_ have clearance… but same, I guess. So aside from the fact you could probably kill me with your brain or what have you…” the teen laughed nervously, voice cracking a little. “But please could I ask that you… not steal anything? Because this is… technically mom’s private lab, so…” he glanced around sheepishly. “It’s going to be me that’s in the shit if anything’s amiss. Normally she tells me stuff, you see, but you know, sometimes an aspiring young scientist’s gotta take things into his own hands…”

Barry was genuinely intrigued now. “Oh?”

“This stuff she’s researching…” Lucas shook his head. “I didn’t mean to come in and snoop around, but…”

He seemed awfully happy to talk, thought Barry; it gave him the impression that this kid didn’t have very many friends, and honestly in his current situation he could sympathise. 

“I just got curious about it!” Lucas blurted. “Mom’s got this new client, you see… she’s been acting as a consultant on… something big, and she’s also being super secretive about stuff. It must be _really_ classified, because normally she tells me all about her work, but…” he shook his head. “I just don’t trust that Lucretia. She… she scares me, a bit.”

Barry tried not to let his alarm show in his physical manifestation. “Lucretia?” _Yes, this was definitely a lot more than he had bargained for. How far did her influence reach these days?_

“Yeah, that’s her name” said Lucas, shuffling his feet. “Look, I don’t know if I should be telling you this stuff…”

“Necromancy” interrupted Barry, abruptly, with a flash of insight. He hadn’t noticed before, but the top secret plans Lucas was holding were covering something; Lucas had even hastened to hide it, before. It was a textbook, and one he recognised too. One he owned, in fact, though of course given as that it originated from another world, this edition had a different design on the dust jacket. Still it was unmistakably the forbidden and extremely cursed volume _Ghouls, Spooks, and Fun With The Undead: Teach Yourself Necromancy The Easy Way_ , by Dr Snobias Hellthrawler PhD, which inexplicably transcended planar systems. As, apparently, did scrawny teens in their goth phase who picked it up from the library disguised as something else to sneak it past their parents. Barry sighed. Well, at least he could make use of this. “Know any?”

As expected, Lucas got rather pink, looking caught in the act. “I uh… it’s all theoretical! Like, super theoretical. Academic.”

“Uh huh.” Barry would have grinned, if his skull’s face wasn’t already. “You wanna learn from a pro, kid?”

Lucas’ eyes widened. “ _Do_ I…?” but then he frowned. “Wait I don’t have to sell you my soul or something, do I? …Is that how this works? Because, uh… I don’t know if I want to do that, even for science. I mean, don’t get me wrong, science is pretty great, and I mean… I guess if I was selling my soul for anything - ”

“I don’t want your soul! I have no interest in your soul” Barry reassured him. “I mean… no, I’m sure you’re great!” he hastened to add, when Lucas looked a little hurt. “Listen kid, I just… want some information.” Barry looked down at the plans in Lucas’ grasp. “About your mother’s new client, and her… uh… dealings.” 

Lucas narrowed his eyes. “You’re not going to kill her are you? Because, uh, that would make telling you stuff like that _super_ morally questionable, even for me…”

Barry shook his head sadly, his voice going softer than he would have liked. “No” he said. “No, I’m not going to kill her.” No matter how much she took away, he could never do that. She was family,after all; even though he had felt his heart break with knowledge of what she had done even as Taako’s spell caved in his chest, he had known, even then with the horror and desperation as the grey static fog came and abruptly faded as he died, _but it hurt, oh it hurt so much_ … even then he knew.

After all, it was what Lup would have done. He knew it with the certainty he knew that she was still his best and truest compass, directing his path and steering his heart even though she was lost, maybe forever. He knew that Lup would never want Lucretia hurt, even through all of this.

“Phew, good” said Lucas, rather derailing Barry’s poignant little moment, he thought it fair to say. “Glad we got out the way with.” His eyes shone. “Okay so, uh, can I just like… ask you a couple billion questions? How did you become a lich? Where’s your phylactery? Am I pronouncing _phylactery_ right? If you created a horde of undead to attack your enemies… would that be fucked up or what? Wait, also, can you teach me Soul Bind? Because like… Mom and I are working on this… ah… project involving robots… but the gems I’m using as the material component keep shattering, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong? Oh! Also…”

Listening to Lucas talk on, Barry sighed inwardly. This better be worth it, he thought. But still, he had to admit that the kid was smart, and, rather disturbingly talented at magic. Given what he was learning of the Miller family, he had to wonder what he - and Lucretia, apparently - had gotten into.


End file.
